--- title: "Tip: Prevent a string from being escaped in JavaScript" type: tip tags: javascript,string authors: chalarangelo cover: blog_images/glass-blowing.jpg excerpt: Strings in JavaScript can be escaped in various ways. But what if you need to prevent a string from being escaped? Here's a handy trick for that. --- By default, when JavaScript sees an escape character (`\`), it will escape the character after it. However, there are cases where you might not want this behavior (e.g. when you want to store a Windows path as a string). For these cases, you can use a template literal and the `String.raw()` tag function: ```js const path = `C:\web\index.html`; // 'C:web.html' const unescapedPath = String.raw`C:\web\index.html`; // 'C:\web\index.html' ``` **Image credit:** [Kym MacKinnon](https://unsplash.com/@vixenly?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)